Just In: The GB Smart Card, Hundreds of Games on One Cartridge
The latest arrival looks like an ordinary Game Boy cartridge, but it carries a small library inside. The GB Smart Card holds up to thirty-two megabytes of Game Boy game ROMs on a single card, and because most Game Boy games are tiny by modern standards, that adds up to the equivalent of hundreds of titles in one slot.
What It Is
It is a grey-market device, part of the unofficial side of Game Boy history rather than anything Nintendo sanctioned. The appeal to whoever bought one originally is obvious: instead of carrying a bag of cartridges, you carried a single card with more games on it than most people would play in a lifetime. The size of the Game Boy's typical ROM, measured in kilobytes rather than megabytes, is exactly what made such a feat possible, and the card is a neat illustration of how modest the console's software really was under the hood.
Why It Joined the Collection
The collection deliberately keeps the unofficial Game Boy as well as the official one, and this card sits alongside the other flash and multi-game cartridges already documented here. Each of these devices is a small monument to demand: people wanted more games, more conveniently, than the official model allowed, and the grey market rushed to supply it. As a piece of hardware history the GB Smart Card is far more interesting than any single legitimate cartridge, because it shows the lengths to which the unofficial scene went to squeeze the whole library into one card.
The GB Smart Card is documented, with photographs, on its own page in the collection.
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